Invisible crisis: Few feel effects of L.A.’s driest year on record

Los Angeles is slouching toward its driest year in history. But the dubious milestone won’t turn lawns in Beverly Hills brown or cause Angelenos to take military showers.

Despite Thursday’s rain showers, forecasters predict this will be the third straight year of drought. Yet the lack of normal rainfall amounts has about as much effect on the daily lives of Southern Californians as the civil war in Syria.

“Unless you are a cattle rancher in Texas or a farmer in Central California, it is pretty invisible,” said Bill Patzert, climatologist from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge.

Why are Californians insulated from dry years? “The water infrastructure we have in California. There is nothing like it in the world,” Patzert said.

Indeed, the nation’s largest water wholesaler, Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, predicts even with more dry years, it will not deny any of its 28 member agencies a drop of water in 2014 or in the years to come. MWD serves cities from the Tehachapi Mountains to the Mexican border.

“We plan to meet all demands that our member agencies will have for 2014. We don’t need to have a shortage reduction or a shortage call for the next few years,” said Debra Man, MWD assistant general manager and chief operating officer.

Water rationing? Not even on the horizon. Neither is a good soaking. And that seeming contradiction is OK — for the near future — because of the improvements in water storage, water transfers, water recycling and widespread use of water-stingy clothes washers, dishwashers and toilets during the last three decades, Man said.

Per capita water consumption in the 1980s reached 210 gallons per day in Southern California, she said. Today, that has dropped to between 150 and 160 gallons per day.

New reservoirs, including the Diamond Valley Lake near Perris filled in 2002, and more capacity for Castaic Lake near the Grapevine area, doubled the amount of water in surface storage. Diamond Valley holds 260 billion gallons — more than Lake Havasu on the Colorado River. The MWD also helped fund recycling projects, such as the Water Replenishment District’s plant that opened in late August that treats wastewater and returns it to the local aquifer. That one plant will save 4 million residents from Montebello to Torrance from using imported water from Northern California or the Colorado River, a first for the WRD.

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That kind of “found water” adds to the region’s drought insurance.

“For the last decade, we’ve invested in making sure we have storage for emergency and operational uses,” Man said.

No rain, no problem?

Rick Hansen is general manager of Three Valleys Municipal Water District in Claremont, one of those MWD member agencies that buys MWD water piped from the Colorado or the State Water Project from Northern California.

Some of the water retailers serve communities without any wells, such as Walnut, a well-to-do suburban town in east L.A. County that relies 100 percent on imported water. That includes water from the Colorado an area entering its 14th straight year of drought.

Even that doesn’t worry Hansen.

“We are OK for calendar year 2014 without any shortages or rationing taking place. We are in good shape,” he said.

But water expert Adan Ortega, who is executive director of the California Association of Mutual Water Companies, said the water industry is giving out false assurances. Ortega says they’ve done a good job conserving water and investing in water recycling but they are not incorporating the future effects of climate change in their planning.

“The average amount of water we will get over time is less. That should alarm us,” he said.

Listen to the Pacific

While a recent UCLA study found climate change will cut snowfall 30 percent in California, others say the wet vs. dry years is part of a centuries old pattern controlled by the sea temperature in the Pacific Ocean.

Patzert acknowledges global climate change as a factor in the L.A. Basin weather patterns. But the much larger factor is the 20-30 year influence of a negative Pacific Decadal Oscillation or PDO. The western Pacific becomes cooler than normal and pushes the Jet Stream, which carries the storms, away from California and the West.

This is a variation on El Niño, the child, which usually brings the West rainy weather, or La Niña, which signals dry weather.

“A negative PDO is like a big La Niña. It has staying power,” Patzert said. It kept the region mostly dry from the 1940s to the early 1970s. The pattern changed to wet in the 1980s and 1990s, with the 1997-98 rain year the last big El Niño. Since 2000, it has been mostly dry, with the exception of the very wet 2004-05 water year.

“We are in drought. We have been in drought for a long time and it is large scale,” he said. “And this is for the entire state.”

Driest year records may be broken not just for L.A. but also for San Francisco and Sacramento, said Nancy Vogel, spokeswoman for the California Department of Water Resources.

For the calendar year, L.A. received 3.49 inches of rain before Thursday’s storm, which added 0.11 inches to the downtown L.A. area where rainfall measurements have been kept since 1877. That brings the total rainfall to 3.60 inches, still on track to be the driest calendar year in 136 years. Unless there is a big storm by New Year’s Eve, the region will break the record of 4.08 inches set in 1947 and 1953, Patzert said. The normal annual rainfall in L.A. is 15 inches.

Snowpack is also down. For the Northern Sierra Nevada, a key watershed for Southern California water flowing down the California Aqueduct, snowpack is 19 percent of normal, said Ted Thomas, a spokesman with the state DWR.

“Snowpack when it melts provides 30 percent of the water we use in California,” Thomas said. “Look at it as a frozen reservoir in the hills.”

Most of California’s precipitation arrives between January and March, he said. That’s when actual DWR technicians go into the Sierra Nevada and check the depth of snowpack firsthand. Snowpack readings are a key factor in determining how much water gets released to Southern California.

“Most of the precipitation is normally in Northern California. The watersheds up there, north of Sacramento, feed the big reservoirs such as Lake Oroville, the largest reservoir in the State Water Project,” he said. Lake Shasta holds water for the federal Central Valley Project.

Unless there are a few breakthrough storms that bypass predictions, snowpack and rainfall amounts will continue downward next year, according to the National Weather Service and JPL experts. So far, even rainstorms like the one on Thursday are weak and carry only a light punch, said NWS Meteorologist Eric Boldt.

Who feels the pinch?

In its first allocation announced last month, the state said it will release just 5 percent of what’s requested from the State Water Project.

Most experts say as a result, certain farmers in the Central Valley will not have enough water to raise some crops. That limitation affects the $11 billion state agribusiness but it is too early in the season to gauge how much.

Still, it set off a shot across the bow by U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Fresno Democrat Rep. Jim Costa, who together wrote a letter to Gov. Jerry Brown on Dec. 9 asking him to declare “a state drought emergency.” The last one was declared by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in June 2008 and was rescinded March 30, 2011 after a wetter year.

Feinstein and Costa are interested in propping up agribusiness, according to sources in Washington. Some say they are just looking to score political points. Feinstein’s aides said so far, the governor has not responded.

Although Metropolitan serves urban Southern California, its managers sympathize with the farmer. “Central Valley agencies and Kern County are considering this (5 percent allocation) a dire situation. I can understand why they would consider this pretty adverse,” Man said.

Of course, the outlook can change in the next three months.

“It’s early in the wet season. We have a lot of winter ahead of us,” Thomas said.

Boldt, who is an expert on Southern California climate, agrees with Patzert that the negative PDO will keep rain well below average this year and next. “We are able to state we are predicting a drier than normal winter for Southern California,” he said Friday. The NWS’s extended local forecast calls for sunny and dry weather through the end of the week.

Patzert has already looked at the ocean numbers and doesn’t see a change in surface water temperatures. He’s predicting more drought well into 2014.

“While some are waiting for a February or March miracle, when the Pacific speaks, we certainly better listen. The Pacific giveth and the Pacific taketh away,” Patzert said.